pee wee herman-palladino: ME: is the carbon footprint of driving my kids to go camping morally permissible if experiencing nature leads them to act more sustainably throughout their lives GOOGLE: we're draining freshwater lakes to tell people to drink bleach

ME: is the carbon footprint of driving my kids to go camping morally permissible if experiencing nature leads them to act more sustainably throughout their lives GOOGLE: we're draining freshwater lakes to tell people to drink bleach

Google's AI Overviews must create entirely new information in response to a search query. That costs an estimated *30 times* more energy than simply extracting information from a source through a traditional search. 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/what... by @parshallison.bsky.social

What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment?www.scientificamerican.com Google is bringing AI answers to a billion people this year, but generative AI requires much more energy than traditional keyword searches

again it's incredible to me that all of these tech companies are like, it's important that we use all of this electricity and water and also we steal all of the intellectual property in the world so that our products work worse and you can be fired from your job. aren't you EXCITED??

imagining the big Pepsi event where they walk out on stage and everyone's cheering and they're like "everything's got piss in it now!!!!"

And the cheers only get louder, and people start being like "Piss in drinks is inevitable, just learn to adapt!"

We took a thing that's insanely good at math and push it to its number-crunching limits in order to purposely make it worse at math than the average adult! This is amazing progress!

(Really smart metaphor! Like the corps, Pepsico could say, "We're not destroying the water we use to generate the piss, we're just converting it [to something unusable as water] for a while!")

ZOOM ZOOM TIME TO CONSOOM

Stock Go Up. Literally the only concern.

Most AI products are dumb and also,

first good data ive seen on the water use which i still don't really *get*—do they not use cooling ponds and heat exchangers like any other large scale cooling need? (eg nuclear power) silly if they don't. and folks: don't read this as pro-ai-maximalism: it has /limited/ use and search ain't it.

Yeah I saw someone knowledgeable post about this recently- a lot of the water is non potable anyway; a lot is recycled within the system (but not 100%). Regardless if you look at golf courses, or alfalfa farms, or like anything, it provides perspective showing this isn’t really a Thing in computing

just considering how server farm water cooling works, it makes little sense- the water has to be specially treated to avoid algal growth and corrosion. alternately if they're using it for building cooling (eg evaporative swamp cooling) that water is...evaporating... it will rain again.

but still, massive waste of energy regardless, when it's used for pointless search summary

"ChatGPT, tell me how to make a hamburger that uses less water." Reply: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER (Semi-serious: Is that amount calculated on a whole cow, or just how much of a cow is needed for one burger?) (Also, I'm guessing, wheat for the bun, costs of shipping, etc.)

Honestly have no idea, I am confident that water usage concerns (and electricity tbh) surrounding machine learning algorithms are misplaced

I have long been asking for a decent set of examples - like how much water does my 24 man FF14 raid use? How about an hour of Rimworld warcrimes? Flipside: How many Chat-GPT queries are there per day, vs. how many hamburgers eaten or rounds of golf played? It's never a simple question.

and don't get me started on golf courses...

I'm excited like water in a kettle, AND WILL BOIL THE FUCK OVER AT ANY MOMENT!

Exactly how I feel about eating meat and then learning that Menendez went to a steakhouse 250 days a year.

FWIW, a potential answer to the question: If it helps them bond with nature and come to appreciate the fragility of life on this planet, then yes. It is worth the footprint.

Besides, what is the footprint really going to be anyway? You're only really driving there. When you get there, you're gonna be so low-footprint that it will effectively even out.

There are a number of train lines that have always travelled to national parks. You can hop an Amtrak from Chicago to Glacier.

This is why you have officially been exempted from Retail Environmentalism™. Send one nasty letter, chain yourself to one corporate HQ door, go to one local meeting about water diversion for corporate purposes: it's more important than worrying about your carbon footprint. Unless you have a Humvee.

I also made a joke about the future of our water -- lo and behold, some Very Serious People showed up

no way George Miller could have predicted in his Mad Max saga that we ran out of water by feeding it to our computers in order to get exclusively wrong and/or made-up answers to questions (that we already knew the computers used to have the answers to before we made them stupid on purpose)

Don’t forget eating glue

"is the carbon footprint of driving my kids to go camping morally permissible—" yes

📌

And they aren't kidding when they say "entirely new" information! Lucy Van Pelt has nothing on AI! www.youtube.com/watch?v=11bE...

06 Little Known Facts You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown 1985 TVwww.youtube.com

Best part? They generate the answers via AI whether we want them or not

Stay away from Minnesota!

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